Spritz Resolutions - Part One

I just love the days after New Year's. The house is clean save for the odd residual evidence of Christmas here and there, the freezer and pantry are stocked with delicious goodies for feeding a hungry family, everyone is still pretty entertained with their presents and no one is exclaiming their boredom with life just yet. That means one thing for me - I get to really relax and do whatever I want to do. Or however much a person with a type-A personality can relax.

The first thing on my agenda is to get back in that kitchen and absolve myself of my culinary sins. Starting with those abhorrent spritz cookies that looked like my cookie press threw up the Christmas tree-like shapes onto the cookie sheet, where in the oven they promptly turn into unidentifiable blobs of soft dough. To top off the offense I added pretty colored sprinkles before baking them - hoping that they would somehow magically convert back into a semblance of Christmas trees (or that at least the sprinkles would make them festive). They didn't. Yes I refrigerated the dough first. They tasted fantastic, but as my father always liked to point out - you eat with your eyes first. Sprinkled blobs just don't cut it. My offspring are not impressed with the cookie press and its product. They want store-bought cookies from professionals. One look at my expression sends them scurrying from the room. That spritz recipe should have worked. It was tender and delicious. It begs to be fixed. I will not buy store bought cookies! At least not today.

What I am really seeking here is redemption. This usually entails defacing a cookbook or two. My mother would be horrified to know that I write all over my cookbooks. Sometimes I wonder if the cookbook authors out there actually make all the recipes they put in their books or if they just throw some in there as filler, hoping for the best when their unsuspecting readers attempt to master one. Or maybe they leave out steps to keep you on your cooking toes. Or...maybe they assume we can read their little chef minds and we somehow already know we are supposed to refrigerate the dough first, but only a little because if it's too hard it won't press and if it’s too soft it will be blobby, even though they don't tell us to; or that fresh breadcrumbs means untoasted and the bread should be slightly stale not super fresh in order not to turn it in a blob of dough in the food processor, and if it is super fresh you should lightly dry it in a low oven, but not toast it in order to keep them "fresh". But of course they assume we know what they mean by fresh breadcrumbs as opposed to just homemade breadcrumbs.

Sometimes I long for a cookbook that includes solutions for recipe malfunctions. It could include a paragraph titled, "What Went Wrong?" and have helpful advice, in case your cookies are blobs, or your no-bake cheesecake doesn't set perfectly, or you somehow end up with pudding when you were going for cake. It could reassure the home cook that the author had those very things happen in their test kitchen, and that no, it doesn't mean you're a hopeless loser, but that circumstances beyond one's control can sometimes cause results to vary, and there's a perfectly plausible explanation, oh and hey - here's how to fix it! Okay - I'm off to redo those recipes (three disasters and counting). Perfectly tender, delicious, beautifully shaped spritz can't be that hard to pull off! I bet Alton Brown doesn't make sprinkled blobs!